Graphic links vs. Text links question...

Link efficiency

[mkfoto]

Hello I just had a quick question if someone could please help me out here. I am making a links page and I just want to make it search engine friendly. So when doing a reciprocal link exchange is it ideal to use text links instead of placing a banner ads on your site? Do the spiders/robots crawl text links and index those better?
Thanks in advance

[MarkWolk]

Text links are usually preferred as the anchor text is given a great importance by search engines, and if you have many links, the page loads faster with text than with graphics.

If you use graphics on some or all of your outgoing links, make sure to have an appropriate alt attribute in the img tag.

[Iqbal_Kaur]

I very much agree with Mark but is google reading text in images or not?
ref: [webmasterworld.com ]

[edited by: martinibuster at 7:51 am (utc) on Mar. 30, 2005]
[edit reason] fixed url [/edit]

[MarkWolk]

That's a totally different issue. If Google is able to read text in images by OCR, I doubt that text is currently indexed or taken into account for ranking of web results. It might be different for image search or catalogue search.

What I was mentioning is 100% sure: Google does attribute a certain importance to alt attributes on linked images. I have a website with a logo at the top of each page; that logo is linked to the index page with a certain, unique phrase. That phrase appears in the SERPS in first position.

[mosaic service]

It is always better to use Text links.

First it looks neat and clean and seconly it will load faster in comparision to pages with lotta banners ans graphics.